There’s no getting around the fact that Android as a platform continues to see significant growth. And while Google certainly likes to brag about the number of daily Android activations, the fact remains that developers are still choosing Apple’s iOS platform over Android. The end result is that apps often debut on the iTunes App Store before they do on Android, and indeed, some apps, such as Smule’s library of popular music-based applications, don’t show up on Android at all.

That notwithstanding, Google chairman Eric Schmidt boldly proclaimed a few weeks ago that mobile development preference for iOS over Android was going to shift in the coming months.

That’s just par for the course for Schmidt, who has grown comfortable making bombastic predictions in his role as Google’s un/official mouthpiece.

A few weeks ago, NetworkWorld laid out a few reasons why developers won’t be flocking to Android anytime soon, one of which was money actually doled out to developers.

Google last week touted that the Android Marketplace had reached the 10 billion download milestone. That’s an impressive figure, to be sure, but notice how Google did not, and in fact never has, divulged a far more telling metric – the amount of money they’ve shared with developers thus far. Apple, in contrast, periodically boasts about the money it’s doled out to iOS developers, with the most recent official figure checking in at over $3.5 billion as of October 2011.

So while total usage numbers are important, how those numbers actually translate into dollars and cents is what truly matters.

And indeed, Apple boasted during its recent earnings conference call that it has, to date, already paid out over $4 billion to developers.

Apple initially reached the $1 billion payout mark in June 2010. One year later, Apple announced they had paid developers $2.5 billion. This past October, 4 months later, Apple announced that they had paid out over $3.5 billion to developers. And just 3 months after that, Apple announced that they had reached the $4 billion mark. So not only are app payments increasing, they’re accelerating.